Category Archives: Biology

Microbiology Online — from the Society for General Microbiology

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Microbiology Online

Source:  Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News [update@genengnewsmail.com]

Mar 15, 2013 (Vol. 6, No. 33)

www.microbiologyonline.org.uk
  • 4 stars = excellent
  • Nice site design and organization
  • No weak points

“Now here is one big website for things so small! The educational website for the Society for General Microbiology, Microbiology Online is packed full of information about microorganisms. Combining animations and actual images of the microbes, the website offers students the opportunity to explore pages such as introducing microbes, microbes and the human body, microbes and food, and microbes and climate change. For teachers, the site provides information on such topics as microbes and basic principles, preparation of media and cultures, activities, and safety information. There are a number of free downloadable resources available to teachers, as well. Beyond the teacher and student pages, Microbiology Online also includes links to the latest news and podcasts/videos. The site is well organized and contains a lot of material to excite both students and teachers of the subject.”

*The opinions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and should not be construed as reflecting the viewpoints of the publisher, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., the publishing house, or employees and affiliates thereof.

eLife — Open Access journal for important research in Life Sciences and Biomedicine

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 “Website for new open-access journal, eLife, launched – 17 Dec 2012

eLife, a new open-access journal for outstanding advances in life science and biomedicine, reveals a fresh approach to presenting and using scientific content on its new website.”

“The eLife journal invites visitors to explore important new research and associated data, read comments and commentary by experts and colleagues, and get a sense of the quality of work that eLife is publishing. Nineteen research papers have now been selected for publication by eLife’s academic editors.

The new site also offers a chance to explore how eLife is taking advantage of digital media. Presentation of content is clean and distraction-free, allowing authors to present the results of their research in full, and inviting readers to delve deeply into the work by exploring figures and their supplements, watching videos, reading editor decision letters and author responses, downloading data sets, viewing article-level metrics, and more. All of this is a starting point, as eLife will continue to solicit feedback from the community in making the presentation as accessible and usable as possible.

The eLife journal is now online at http://elife.elifesciences.org.”

Click here

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Dec. 17, 2012

ScienceAlerts.com adds Biological Sciences category

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Thailand ScienceAlerts.com adds Biological Sciences category – 06 Apr 2012

“ScienceAlerts.com, a Web 2.0 social network to discover and share scholarly content, has announced that the latest addition to this natural sciences website is the Biological Sciences Category. The new Biological Sciences category currently features 520,658 stories largely derived from 984 scientific biology publishing sources.

ScienceAlerts.com’s Biological Sciences Category covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, genetics, and distribution. This category also provides a Biological Sciences RSS feed to stay up to date with the latest research in this science discipline. One of the latest articles presents the interrelationship of mycophagous small mammals and ectomycorrhizal fungi in primeval, disturbed and managed Central European mountainous forests.

Besides the Biological Sciences category, ScienceAlerts.com contains an Agricultural Sciences Category which the cultivation and production of crops, raising of livestock, and post-harvest processing of natural products. ScienceAlerts.com’s Environmental Sciences Category covers the external physical conditions affecting growth, development, and survival of organisms, and their management while it’s Forestry Sciences Category presents the cultivation, maintenance, and development of forests. ScienceAlerts.com’s Geographical Sciences Category covers the physical characteristics of the earth including its surface features, and the distribution of life on earth, and that of the Health Sciences aggregates the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms.

ScienceAlerts.com’s review process is partly automated and partly manual to rigorously ensure that only relevant content is featured on the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceAlerts.com is usually only minutes. ScienceAlerts.com includes a search feature to retrieve specific titles or keywords from its’ large database. In addition, it suggests up to ten related articles for each article selected.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter, April 6, 2012

National New Biology Initiative — report from NRC

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Phillip Sharp - co-chair of the committee.

September 17, 2009 — According to a new report from the National Research Council, the emergence of "New Biology" — where scientists and engineers from many disciplines collaborate on ways to take advantage of dramatic recent advances in biology, such as the ability to sequence entire genomes — offers an opportunity to solve some of society’s most pressing problems. The report recommends a National New Biology Initiative to accelerate such research and apply it to our greatest challenges.

 

Source: National Academies News, Sept. 17th.

AAAS — Communicating Science

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"Science Communication to take center stage at AAAS Annual Pacific Division meeting – 13 Aug 2009

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced that attendees of its 90th Annual Pacific Division Meeting, scheduled for August 17, 2009, in San Francisco, will get to learn about the latest efforts in science communication from some of the leading experts in the field. The symposium is called ‘Good Science is Only Part of the Job: Communicating Science to the Public’.

As science has become a larger part of the cultural landscape, researchers have frequently found themselves navigating the difficult waters of policies and politics. It has become increasingly necessary for scientists to work with the media to assure accurate portrayals of science issues so there can be better understanding by the public and therefore better decisions by policy makers. Each of the presentations will address how scientists can be better equipped to manage different media when sharing research and information with the public.

Hank Campbell, founder of ScientificBlogging.com, an independent online science community, will chair the symposium and present ‘Why Communicating Science Is Important.’ Greg Critser, science and health book author, long time science and medical journalist, will discuss how to use journalistic methods to transform research into compelling media discourse – from newspapers and magazines to the Internet and the blogo-sphere, in ‘Interacting with science journalists.’

Prof. Michael Eisen, Department of Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley, will discuss efforts to reinvent scientific communication. Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director for the National Center for Science Education, will discuss how science is a product of human beings, which means it is affected by human institutions including politics. Dr. Michael White, Department of Genetics and Center for Genome Sciences, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, will discuss science communication misfires and how science bloggers deflated the hype over the Ida fossil, exposed a stealth creationist paper in a peer-reviewed journal, and have relentlessly pummeled dubious claims about vaccines, stem cells, climate change, and personalised medicine, in ‘Blazing Your Own Trail: Writing Directly to the Public.’"

Source (verbatim):  Knowledgespeak Newsletter, August 13th.

SCITABLE — online science reference library (Nature)

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"Scitable is a free, high quality online science reference library brought to you by Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

Scitable currently covers the field of genetics, and will be expanding across other sciences over the next year.  Scitable’s content is commissioned and edited by editors at NPG, and peer-reviewed by the scientific community, so it is reliable, exhaustively researched, and carefully developed.

As journalists around the world of science have been writing recently, Scitable is the definitive online source for credible and comprehensive scientific information for non-scientists. "

Source:  email from Nature Publishing Group, July 28, 2009.